This invention relates to a food-depositing apparatus and particularly to an automatic means and apparatus for applying and depositing a shredded or granulated meat upon a based member such as a pizza crust.
Manual processing and production of pizzas, particularly frozen pizzas which are sold in grocery stores and the like, is a relatively time consuming and expensive procedure and makes quality control difficult. As a result of such problems and the like, various automatic pizza forming devices have been suggested in the pizza forming art. Highly satisfactory apparatus is disclosed in the several patents of the present inventor, such as U.S. Pat. No. 3,368,501, which issued Feb. 13, 1968; U.S. Pat. No. 3,682,106 which issued Aug. 8, 1972 and U.S. Pat. No. 3,779,205 which issued Dec. 18, 1973. Such patents disclose highly satisfactory automatic apparatus for the processing of pizzas by the automatic and sequential application of the various materials to a pizza base including sauce, meat, shredded cheese and the like. U.S. Pat. No. 3,368,501 particularly discloses a highly satisfactory means for applying of shredded food which has been particularly satisfactory in depositing of cheese on sauce covered shells. U.S. Pat. No. 3,779,205 discloses an apparatus particularly adapted for applying of shredded meat to the base members.
Although such systems provide significant teaching in the development and product of pizza forming apparatus, they have not generally had the capability of automatic application of shredded meat with the control and/or speed comparable to that of the application of the shredded cheese and sauce particularly with the high degree of accuracy desired in the metering of the meat.